Disunited Cults of America

 Tribal politics is how it is usually described, but it is too rigid and restrictive for "tribes" to be a useful term.  It's more like cults--a relatively small, homogeneous group sharing a defining common belief or leader or both.  Cults rather than tribes define everybody outside of it as wrong and as enemies.

We've seen the Republican party, including its leaders and official organization, become a cult.  However you look at it--a Trump cult that believes everything Trump tells them, or a mostly social media created cult with a set of core beliefs that fixates on Trump--or, I suspect, both at the moment.

A major political party that is its own cult can hardly avoid being authoritarian and fascist.  The party may exist only for itself--that's more or less what political parties have been, except at their best--but elected officials who exist only for the cult undermine democratic governance. When the cult demands this, it is not interested in representative democracy or in governance.  It is interested only in the cult.  That's Mitch McConnell, with or without Trump.

The media doesn't help clarify this when it gets lazy.  For instance, in order to distinguish the infrastructure bill that some Republicans have worked with Democrats to fashion, from the infrastructure bill that only Democrats are working on and planning to pass with a party line vote, a media report referred to the latter as the "partisan bill."  But it isn't partisan.  The stuff it will pay for--the childcare, clean energy, expanded Medicare benefits etc.--will not go only to its partisans, other Democrats.  They benefit Republicans and Democrats and nonpartisans, just as the other infrastructure bill does.  Elected members of only one party may pass a big infrastructure bill, but members of both parties and no party will benefit, not because they are members of one cult or another, but because they are Americans.  That's the job legislators are supposed to do.

The same can't be said of at least the intent of state level legislation to limit voting opportunities, and especially to allow partisans to intervene in voting to change the outcome.  But these are now cults that claim an election was stolen without any basis for the claim, and that violence in the Capitol that everyone has seen on film didn't happen.  

So to be in the Republican cult you have to deny demonstrable reality.  And some of them openly admit that's exactly what they are doing--they repeat the Big Lies loudly and often, as a technique, especially using social media.  Even Trump admits this is what he does.  Just last week he admitted that when he doesn't like the outcome of a poll he says it's fake, and when he does like it, it's the best poll ever.  He's done that with every election he's been involved in--if he or the people he supports win, it's a fair election.  If he or they don't, it's a steal.  There's not much more to it than that.

By their nature cults require uniform opinion, known to some of us as dogma, and cults exist to create enemies--everyone who doesn't agree and therefore are evil.  Political cults are all about creating anger as a tool of solidarity and motivation. (That goes for political cults of every opinion.) This is what eventually becomes their weakness.  For eventually, someone or some subgroup within the cult disagrees with something, and then anger is turned on them.  Cults subdivide into warring factions.  

They continue to do damage--that's basically all that cults do, wreck things.  Eventually they start turning their anger on each other and destroying themselves.  Whether the Republican cult destroys itself before it destroys American democracy is the question that will be out there until at least 2025, unless they self-destruct before then. Because they don't now have the votes to win elections.  That's why they're working hardest at cheating the system.  What we need is not cults on the other side, but political will to support fair elections.

There are other political cults out there.  Recently UC Berkeley cancelled the founder of its anthropology department by taking his name off a building.  They haven't renamed it yet.  I suggest that Scapegoat Hall would be appropriate.

But when the public business is being controlled by a cult that is not at all interested in the public but only in its own survival, that trumps all.

Pandemic of the Public Mind

 First of all, R.I.P. Bill Barnhart, college classmate and Chicago journalist.

This coronavirus pandemic is not over.  The Delta variant is now the dominant strain in the US, and new infections have doubled in a few weeks.  Evidence so far is that the major vaccines protect against serious initial illness but don't necessarily prevent infection that can be transmitted to others.  How deadly this variant is in comparison to other strains will be learned the hard way in the coming weeks.

Nevertheless, the pressure to ignore the virus continues, and to go back to ways that make spreading infection easier.  The CDC has issued guidelines loosening precautions that other organizations find alarming and certainly premature.  One problem is the premise the CDC has stated: "Your health is in your hands."

This is both ultimately true and dangerously false in its implications and assumptions.  It is true that as individuals we are responsible for evaluating risk, but not only to ourselves; also to others.  For it is not true that only my health is in my hands--so to an extent is yours.

Because this is an infectious disease, and the Delta variant is especially infectious.  I am vaccinated, so my risk of serious illness is small.  But I may also be risking the health of others by passing on my infection.  My decisions affect the public health.

This is especially true now of vaccinations.  The CDC mantra can be interpreted as meaning, you can guard your health by getting vaccinated--it's your decision.  But the obverse is also implied: if you feel your health will be fine if you don't get vaccinated, then don't.  And that is an abdication of public responsibility.

The virus feeds on the unvaccinated, and its mutations into other variants depends on them.  The fewer people with immunization, the longer the virus lasts and continues to get more efficient at infecting people, and perhaps more deadly.  If more Americans were immunized now, this pandemic might truly be almost over.

I don't pretend to understand the madness of politicizing vaccinations and attempts to stop a pandemic. Where were these Republicans when people danced in the streets because a polio vaccine was coming?  There is something frighteningly akin to a virus of the mind that's running rampant in America, turning ordinary people into rabid monsters.   Politicians and talk show hosts infected by frenzied ambition--we've seen that before.  Lies viciously promoted are their bread and butter.

This pandemic has seen one miracle: the development so quickly of vaccines that are so effective.  We've seen healthcare institutions strenuously tested, and the resilience of the supply chain.  They've held up.  But the only way we come out of this stronger is if this pandemic strengthens our public health system, and Americans' commitment to public health. 

 Here where I am, our Humboldt County public health office--underfunded for years, practically invisible until this--has functioned very well.  Our new public health director is not keeping us as informed as we've been used to.  But perhaps more is going on behind the scenes.  Still, our county vaccination rate is stalled at just above 50%.  It seems to be the younger adult age groups failing to be vaccinated.  Perhaps these milennials believe they'll survive infection but maybe kill off a few of their hated boomers. 

 Our state public health did well early in the pandemic, but shows signs of the same panic that's sweeping the country to make it all go away by denying its existence.  And despite the new administration and its quick and admirable job of getting the country access to vaccines, the federal public health system does not look appreciably better, yet.

The most depressing of course is the pandemic of the public mind that does not see that public health protects individuals twice--by responding to their individual needs, and by maintaining a level of health throughout the public that better protects every individual. 

 I don't know how widespread this rabid craziness is, that has Tennessee firing its vaccine director for actually protecting public health, and forbidding any outreach on vaccination opportunities.  But I don't see strong advocates for public health to at least try to counter this ultimately suicidal attitude and behavior.  

This isn't the last pandemic for most people alive today.  The distorted climate is going to encourage more of them, as well as cause other effects that require a public response, an ethic of you'd do the same for me. If that dies first, this society dies degraded and without honor.

Of That Colossal Wreck

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land, 

 Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

 Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

 Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

 And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

 Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

 Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

 The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

 And on the pedestal, these words appear:

 My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

 Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! 

 Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

 Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

 The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

---P. B. Shelley

Photo: Death Valley, California

One of the best known sonnets outside of Shakespeare in the English language, attaining new meaning this week.  Most commentaries on the Internet are pretty shallow, but scholar David Mikics is informative.  For one thing he explains that the word "mocked" in the line "The hand that mocked them" is used primarily in the old sense of meaning "described" (or perhaps just what the sculptor does--makes an image in the stone.)  Though our sense of mocked is of course the judgment of time.